


Like Tinder for Ghosts

by montparnasse



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Lie Low At Lupin's, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-17
Updated: 2016-01-17
Packaged: 2018-05-14 13:40:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5745934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/montparnasse/pseuds/montparnasse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cornwall, 1995. Misery loves company; company just wants a drink.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like Tinder for Ghosts

He read once that human beings are predisposed to record their own history, some ancient, errant impulse thrumming in electric waves across the landscape of the mind that compels us to kick and scream and make a fuss with ink and alphabets until we’ve left a sufficient enough mark on blank pages or vandalized outside of dingy London pubs for all the discerning patrons to see. Wherever he read it—one of Lily’s books?—he’s long forgotten, but the line sticks to his ribs even now, and he used to wonder if he shouldn’t make more of an effort to write down important dates, take photos, record his most delicate thoughts on expensive stationery, maybe leave filthy loves letters to Remus à la Joyce lying around the place purely for the scandalized reaction upon their discovery after his (preferably timely) demise. Time and the _Prophet_ have taken care of that for him, the truth of it notwithstanding; as for himself, well, he fucked Remus outside a pub in Camden when they were twenty-one. It’ll do.

“You remember stupid things,” Remus tells him, picking at a loose thread on the couch. He’s got his box of photos out again, the one he says he took down from the attic but which Sirius suspects actually came from under his bed; the pictures are all well-organized in their albums, most of them pristine. Remus’s old Potions book is still dog-eared, hints to his sixteen-year-old mind folded away neatly into the margins. “Be sure to leave that out when they give you the book deal, y’know, after all this.”

“Your unimpeachable virtue just couldn’t take it, right.”

“Naught to take.”

“That’s because you’re easy, mate,” says Sirius, and is gratified to see the left side of Remus’s mouth twitch from the corner of his eye. It’s his favorite smile, the one Remus used to hide in teacups and fraying cable-knit sleeves when they were young; a human signature, he supposes, like a cough or a particular shade of laughter that never changes and becomes identifiable over time to the people who love you most. “I’d remind you who started that, but the selective memory loss is dire enough already that I’m afraid to hear what other tender memories have gone the way of Swiss cheese while I’ve been gone.”

“I’d say it’s held up at least as well as yours, given that I know it wasn’t the first time,” says Remus, still smiling. By the time Sirius returns it he’s staring out the window again.

“This is what you’re letting into your home. Ghosts of Christmas Past and reminders of your own misspent youth.” He turns the page and watches Remus holding three-day-old Harry like an antique dealer with a bone-china doll. “Look at this—you actually still knew how to smile in this one.”

Remus groans, and doesn’t turn to look at the photo. “You’re so dramatic,” he says, “but it’s invigorating. Twelve whole years in Azkaban and you’re as manic as ever.”

No, it was twelve years for _you_ , he thinks, mostly without rancor. There’s little enough of himself left of note now, little that _can_ be, stuck here in whispers and shadows; more and more, he wonders if there was ever that much at all. He remembers the nights in Azkaban, mostly, the cold salt-air like December used to taste and the sickly wedge of light made by the moon stretching its fingers through the bars, remembers how he used to lie in it, watching it get into the starved machinery of his body like ink or a second skin while he tried to pick his way through the incomprehensible wilderness of his own mind, trying to keep a running list of what was his: a few biographical facts, strange fragments of a poem or maybe a song—his name, a line of Dickenson— _Good morning, Midnight!_ —that made him laugh until he retched onto the stone, the names of the marks they gave him from his chest down to his navel, the correct number of toes. Primal poetry, tattooed into his heart-meat with the bare fact of his pulse: the solace of memory, the syntax of being.

When he dreamed at all, he dreamed of eating: porridge with enormous spoonfuls of honey, rashers of bacon, roast pork and new potatoes and treacle tart and takeaway cashew curry, mouthful after greedy mouthful, almost pornographically; and then after, always, the rats. He would hunt them through the walls of his prison and then through the forests, sniffing them out in the grass and the fenland until he caught them by the tail and clamped down first with canine incisors, then with human molars, feeling the precious burst of blood, the snap of sinew and bone. He would wake up grinding his teeth in the dark, heavy with half-remembered dreams in the sunken coffin of his own body, the vortex of his stomach churning, screaming, voracious.

He told Remus all of this in the beginning, lying on very separate sides of his bed at three o’clock in the morning because neither of them can sleep much anymore. Remus had looked at him the way you might look at a cat you’ve hit with your car, and Sirius could _feel_ it, like he wanted to be sick or cry or reach out and touch him, or he was just too old to remember how to shift the geometry of a body so long set into stillness, so he spent the rest of the night in the garden wrapped in a flannel blanket with the bony remnants of the tomatoes and lavender, watching the veiny trickle of Cornish autumn stars until the sun bled them from the sky. Neither of them has brought it up again, but Remus dragged out his box of brain-shards and history the next morning, and they’ve been going through it ever since, every single time Sirius turns up on his doorstep in the middle of the night to steal a toothbrush and lie awake under the thin quilt on the left side of Remus’s bed, every time they say nothing of wandering mouths or limbs in the clear light of morning.

“There,” he says, pointing to a photo of them in the matchbox-sized kitchen of their first flat where he’s trying to cook something with Remus, who keeps handing him measuring cups and spoons from where he’s sitting on the counter, laughing silently at something Sirius leaned over and said to him. He can’t remember who took it; James, maybe, or McKinnon. “Another one. Look at him, Remus Miserabilius Lupin, still full of wonder and hope before time and circumstance brought him here to his living room, mentally composing the world’s saddest poem.”

“Time and circumstance weren’t very happy,” says Remus, rubbing at the thin fingernail-fine scar through his eye, “or very funny, or conducive in general to not being a—what did you say? A joyless fuck.”

“Still wouldn’t kill you to laugh once in a while,” says Sirius, turning away from the strange nineteen-year-old creature who tried to make a Christmas pudding and knew how to make Remus laugh.

“Maybe you’re just not funny.”

“See, now you’re getting somewhere,” he says dryly, watching Remus stare into his tea, watching him not looking at him and feeling the blunt, clean hurt of it; better, at least, than the sadness rotting in his gut, the awful starving thing that gnaws at his heart and lungs. “Keep it up and you’ll manage a smile in another week.”

“Because it’s all a hilarious joke, right, ha-ha, doesn’t it help to laugh at what a mess we are when this could really all have been avoided. My hair’s going grey and everyone’s dead. Hilarious.”

His laugh comes out as a sharp yap like a dog’s on a cold night, high and wild, but Remus smiles at him over the rim of his teacup. “That’s the spirit, Moony,” he says, and picks up another photo album.

When he turns the pages all the way to the end of the album he sees the narrow record of Remus’s life in snapshot retrospect, all the different men he’s been, the ones Sirius wants to know, the ones he can’t have; he wonders if this is as much for Remus as it is for him, this trying to remember, trying to learn to be happy with what was instead of dealing with what is, like that’s ever done them any good before. If it were him, he thinks, he’d have punctured his brain and let it all leak out his ears. He wonders if Remus ever thought about it—if he’d just pointed his wand at his head and gone fishing, plucked out every memory he had and poured them down the kitchen sink like cold tea, cigarette ash, bad blood, if he’d have felt better with it gone than swallowing his grief like medicine. But if there’s one golden, unwavering constant he knows about Remus Lupin, it’s that his tendencies towards sentimentalism and self-loathing outweigh self-destruction and even, sometimes, self-preservation; Remus would lie awake at night and gorge himself sick on happy memories before he would ever let himself forget.

“I’m surprised you never, y’know, burned any of them,” he says to Remus, leafing through his old potions book. “You could always do that thing with your fingers, when you were lighting a cigarette or else when they were—what’s this?”

Notes, it seems: wrapped in a bundle is every single note he ever passed to Remus in sixth year stuck right in the middle of his old book like treasure, like finding something beautiful in the dark. Remus grabs them just as he starts to read through them hungrily, setting his cold tea down and standing up. “I meant to throw _those_ out,” he says, like he’s seventeen again and afraid, like they aren’t all worn out at the edges from reading and re-reading and held together with fraying twine.

“Fuck you, I was reading those,” says Sirius, but he doesn’t get up to go after him. That it hurts, or that Sirius can’t read the dark illegible thing that’s replaced his smile, wouldn’t occur to Remus and maybe never would have. Remus, who spent twelve years in love with a traitor and a murderer; Remus, who never had to nurse anyone’s wounds but his own, who ached and ached and never knew where it really hurt because it was always too deep, too old, the way only Sirius ever understood because of how it festered in him, too. Near the end of things, after a spectacular fight that filled the whole flat like the steady expanse of oxygen well into the morning, Remus had told him that he’d loved him since the day they met on the train when they were eleven whole years old; Sirius, who hadn’t seen him for three weeks by then because Remus kept disappearing in the middle of the night, felt it like a blow to the ribs: an underhanded ambush, a leg-trap that caught him by the ankle. He didn’t believe him, but he still feels it on the bad nights when the north wind blows in from the sea, a permanent limp in his walk, vicious toothy scars heavier than any shackle around his leg could ever have been. He’s had the same hitch in his step ever since.

He supposes Remus kept them for the same reasons he didn’t burn any photographs or leave England forever in the end, relics of his own history to hold or maybe have a nice cry over late at night when he can’t sleep, when he thinks that sometimes he might have dreamed it all—just to remind himself that it was his, that he had these beautiful things that were taken away from him, that it was ever real. Maybe he drags it out from under his bed and tries to forage the truth from it, his own or Sirius’s or all of theirs together, scavenging through bones long picked clean, trying to put two and two together alone.

But the problem is, two and two doesn’t always get you the truth, or redemption, or anything worth fucking with at all. Two and two is a man moaning in the deathbed darkness of a prison cell; two and two is another man a thousand miles away sobbing on a bathroom floor, _I loved you, I loved you_ , as if they are the only words that mean anything at all. Two and two is thinking of the way Peter used to teeter at the edges of a room, how he could stitch himself to the shadows and find a weak spot in the thickest castle walls and thinking, _you idiot, you stupid motherfucker, you should have known, you’d’ve seen if you had half the brain you thought you did_ , and then looking at twelve-year-old Peter Pettigrew grinning at him over Gobstones and pumpkin pasty from Remus’s photo album and knowing, deeper down, that it’s never that easy. Two and two equals the empty space between himself and Remus on the sagging bed they share every night. Two and two is twelve dead years. A living man is not his labelled bones.

—

He avoids mirrors unless grievous injury or a shave necessitate it, keeping his head down when he washes his hands or passes by the talkative one in the hallway he still calls Mrs. Lupin so he doesn’t have to see the way his veins branch out under the paperwhite skin of his chest or how his mouth still twitches into shapes he doesn’t recognize, so old and so young it gets confusing when he looks himself in the eye. Some days he thinks he preferred himself starved and freezing in his cave outside Hogsmeade, where Remus never gave him funny looks on the days when he can’t justify eating anything at all, and Sirius doesn’t have to acknowledge the sad cast of his eyes as understanding. There are fewer of those now, especially with Remus always cooking too much and himself starved for everything; he can feel the meat on his ribs, the unfamiliar, white-buttery swell of his belly from regular meals and a rediscovered and vigorous love of Ogden’s Old. He watches his hair fall into the sink and thinks of the trees at the edge of the woods, young and grown over with moss and ivy.

When they were young— _younger_ , he reminds himself—he used to lie awake some nights during those first few war years and feel the crush of the shattering, empty space on Remus’s side of the bed like a vacuum, whispering _I’m here_ to himself until he found in it an echo of comfort. At first they’d talk when one of them came home from an Order job in its fledgling days, smoothing back hair, licking each other’s wounds; then they started drinking as soon as they walked in the door every night: after Marlene McKinnon bled out cold and alone in the Gog Magog Hills, after they found bits of Benjy Fenwick and his family plastered to the walls of their house, after he and Remus met each other’s eyes across the new swell of Lily’s belly and thought, with all the shared brain-circuitry time and love had grown between them, _Are they fucking insane_. 

They learned to move with the weight of sadness festering in their guts, and then with the guilt of being left alive to feel it at all. Every day they ate and breathed and slept with the war-weight slung across their shoulders and then came home and fucked the anger and the fear out of each other, or maybe deeper into each other, Sirius with a hand clasped unnecessarily over Remus’s silent mouth until he shook and came with his teeth bared in devouring pressure-points against Sirius’s palm; and later still, while he thought of Remus pretending to be asleep beside him and how very easy it would be for someone to break through their spider-webbed wards, take him, kill him right here where they might both be too drunk to even notice, he’d get out of bed and spend the night on the couch, smoking out the window and watching for midnight passersby in the street below. When he wondered why they hadn’t tried already, he’d finish the rest of the bottle, or else open a new one if Remus had already taken care of that for him. More often than not, he had.

Then, sometime that August, Remus stopped coming home at all. It was strange that what Sirius felt most of all at the time was a sense of relief: that the worst had finally happened, and the waiting-for was over. At night, he played one of Remus’s secondhand Dylan records until five in the morning and whispered to himself in the smothering summer-blue of dawn: _I’m here, I’m here, I’m here_ , as if he could mother himself or love himself when the rest of the world had frozen over, as if the fact of his own breathing body had ever been enough.

“I’m here,” he says to himself in the bathroom mirror, and wonders if he really is. He’s cut his hair unevenly, like ink spilled on paper, something he could have pulled off at twenty but at thirty-five just looks deranged in a flaccid, half-arsed sort of way—a six-sickle paperback villain. When he tries to vanish it wandlessly from the sink, he only manages to get half; he turns on the leaky faucet and rinses the rest down the drain loud enough to drown out the sounds of Remus making tea on the rickety gas stove in the kitchen, thinking about arithmancy equations and tectonic shift and the terrible, unspeakable gulf of years between twenty-one and thirty-five.

—

On first glance, Remus seems to be a man made up entirely of regret and shame and a self-possessed kindness, all held together with darned robes and an unyielding sense of responsibility. Sirius, who knows what he looks like naked and bleeding and screaming and coming, has never been under any such delusion even at the end of twelve years in the Shrieking Shack: beneath the cracked-glass placidity shallower than half his scars and the words he measures carefully until he can think of something clever to say is the person Sirius loves, the one who is indeed full up with regret and shame like him and can often out-drink anyone, who knows how to cut to the bone, who can recite Yeats by heart and mumbles runes under his breath when he reads and who loves the world in spite of the world, the same person who cultivates kindness in himself because he knows enough of cruelty, whose hands are always cold, who never throws anything away, who apologizes for bumping into inanimate objects and who has a smile that is always crooked and irrevocably beautiful. He’s the most resoundingly irresponsible and emotionally dishonest man Sirius has ever known, so when he sits at the end of the bed after an evening of Talisker and Not Talking About It while Sirius dries his face in the bathroom, he knows it for exactly what it is.

“You really thought it was me,” says Remus. He’s running his fingers over the edges of a smooth stone Sirius brought him when he first got here, carried between thin pockets and dirty hands and a dog’s mouth all the way through the West Country until he walked through Remus’s doorway to find that nothing much had changed since his parents had lived here: same furniture, same paint-chipped, crackling radiators, same door you had to lean on and twist the knob just right to get it to lock, and a frightening, beautiful, threadbare stranger yearning for him the way the last of the leaves were clinging to the trees in the darkness of coming winter. “Didn’t you.”

“Yes,” says Sirius. The full moons spent away, the way all their faces changed, how he used to turn up at the flat early some mornings after a week of unexplained absence, a new limp in his step, and Sirius half-expected him to ask if he could kip on the couch like he hadn’t woken up with Remus stuck in the gaps between his spine-rungs and wedged under his tongue every morning for the last three years. Lily’s furious worry and James’s what-ifs and Peter’s nervous sideways whispers about unknowns and hollow excuses and finally _I don’t, I can’t know, but I can’t trust him right now, either_ , and Sirius would have busted his nose in half if he hadn’t been thinking the same thing.

He wouldn’t realize until much later how doomed they all were then, when what mattered wasn’t the truth but how it sounded. By that point, he didn’t want to be in love with Remus anymore, nor, he thought, Remus in love with him. But he didn’t know how to be anything else.

“I thought it was you until the day I knew it wasn’t,” he says, wishing for more whiskey. “And I lived unhappily ever after, the end.”

“Good,” says Remus, turning the stone over in his palm. “That’s good.”

“And you thought it was me.”

“Until the moment I knew it wasn’t.”

“Then that’s good, too.”

Remus starts picking at his fingernails when Sirius sits beside him, the bed creaking mightily. It was old, probably, when he bought it. “For as much good as it does us, I suppose,” he says. “At least we believed we were both capable of committing horrific atrocities we’d spent our lives fighting against? It’s not like it gets much worse.”

“You could go sit in Azkaban for twelve years,” Sirius offers, getting up and going to Remus’s desk, watching the sepia shadow-play of the photos in cheap maple frames—his mother, a family photo from when Remus looks to be eight or nine, all four of them at Brighton during the summer before seventh year. There are few he’s found of Remus post-1981 to piece together a collage of who he might have been then, most of them kept at the back of a sparse album with pictures of jagged-toothed foreign landscapes and different cramped bedsits, the occasional Grindylow or unfamiliar face. In one of them, taken apparently in November 1988, Remus’s eyes flicker sideways to the man sitting beside him, a dark-haired stranger, all sharp eyes and cheekbones. Sirius wonders if he fucked him here, on this creaking bed in his childhood bedroom. “Jesus, listening to you I’d think you did. It’s like—you had the whole fucking _world_ , Remus, and you act like you were trapped in your own prison the whole time. You had—all of this,” his hand sweeps around the small room pitifully to encompass the dusty plywood desk and the dresser, the books, the few personal effects, “and you had _time_. You were free.”

“Yes, Sirius, everyone I’d ever loved was dead or as good as and I could barely get a job as a part-time toilet-scrubber but I was _free_. Ta for putting that into perspective, mate. That changes _everything_.” Remus glares at him, equal parts anger and hurt thrumming through the exhausted shadows of his face. “Why do you always have to do this? Why is—I’m not doing the my-suffering-is-greater-than-your-suffering thing like it’s some sort of fucking game of who lost the most.” 

“Never stops you from starting it anyway.” Sirius watches him bite a bleeding fingernail.

“I didn’t have anyone. I didn’t have anything.”

“You might’ve, I don’t know, moved to France. Written a book on Boggart extermination. Gotten married.”

Remus laughs, a rough rasp like a sawblade, the one he always used to look ashamed of after. “Things haven’t exactly improved on that front either, in case you haven’t noticed.”

“The werewolf front or the being queer front?”

“Both,” answers Remus, pressing a quiet hand in front of his eyes and lying down, long legs still stretched across the floor. “Sometimes I’m not sure where one stops and the other starts. Muggles hate you for one thing and wizards hate you for the other and half of everyone who says they’re on your side just wants to exploit one of those things more than they want to, I don’t know, actually think about it. I used to work with a part Veela girl who dyed her hair and went for girls in Muggle clubs because she didn’t have to worry about the whole half-breed thing at least, even if men still acted like she was the breathing embodiment of every fetish they’d ever had, and she said it’s like—there’s your blood, and there’s this thing strung up inside you, and the blood feeds it. That they were inseparable.”

“Mmm. Sounds like she read too many cheap novels about Veela and Metamorphmagi girls preying on the Victorian sensibilities of proper witches.”

“That, too.”

“The ones with the hugely-endowed werewolves who do nothing except bite and fuck were always good for a laugh. Or fire starters on damp nights,” says Sirius, stretching out beside Remus on the bed and feeling the ancient springs give beneath him. “You always did get a bit insatiable in the week before. But you have yet to hold me down and mark your territory like I’m a vulnerable nail in need of hammering with a twelve-inch rod of velvety iron, which as I understand is the first thing you were supposed to do—I almost feel cheated.”

“There’s an image,” says Remus. “Is it any wonder I lost my virginity before James did? I never had a chance.”

“Could’ve lost it a lot sooner if you’d told me.”

“I seem to recall you were fairly busy with Mary Macdonald at the time. I seem to recall half the school wanted to be busy with you at the time.”

“While I was having the most intensely pornographic dreams about you for months and usually waking up to shove a hand down my pants while you were sleeping in the next bed.”

“I was always a little afraid one of you was a latent Oneiromancer and you’d find out about mine,” says Remus, smiling in a way that looks more like a grimace. “She was right, though. They make you lock yourself up so you won’t get to anyone else, so you just have this awful starving thing in your gut that rips you to shreds either way. Only difference is I do it literally, I suppose.” He stares at the ceiling, where the dim fluorescent lights illuminate the blades of the fan that hasn’t been dusted for probably a decade. “I thought about leaving, once, after—after. But they were always so insular, and hungrier than I even was, and by that time the Ministry was pushing for worse restrictions to punish the ones who’d swallowed Voldemort’s bullshit instead of their bullshit—the mandatory check-ins after the full moon, hospital segregation, panic defenses. Muggles were doing the same things, for different reasons. Or maybe the same ones really, I don’t know. It’s like—what you have now, maybe, a sort of half-existence, or a separation from the world that should be yours. So I got out of England for a while. I took care of giant squid at a magical research institute in Lithuania and lived out of an abandoned convent that’s still bombed-out from the last world war. Then I cleaned up stockrooms for two galleons a week and worked for a private school in Palampur to help keep the Dark things out.” He folds an arm across his belly, and Sirius watches his mouth go tight. “Nothing’s changed about that.”

“You’ve still got all your teeth and your toes. You’re not going bald. You still managed better than me.”

“Ha bloody ha, Pads.”

Whether it’s the whiskey or the sound of it all screaming in his belly that’s unraveled the confessional thread, Sirius doesn’t—wouldn’t—know. Remus has always been very good at living in his own head; it used to be that Sirius knew how to coax him from it, with his voice or his hands or a cup of Darjeeling or a good shag, and he wonders now at how he’s brought it on without meaning to. He wants suddenly to go back and know this man, wander the ends of the earth with him and live out of boxes and beg each other’s forgiveness and give themselves over again. He feels it like a sharp tearing burn, all those dead years, all the fire of the people they never got to be.

“Why did you come back?” he asks. When he turns his head, he finds Remus already looking at him: the same brown eyes, the same off-kilter nose, the same weedy grace he had at twenty; sometimes, Sirius thinks their bodies have grown over them rather than with them. He remembers that he’d kissed him like this, the first time: lying on Remus’s bed in the dormitory, both of them eighteen and stupid-drunk, the abrasive chords of a Buzzcocks song skipping on the turntable. Remus, convinced it was a particularly cruel joke or else some bit of obscure and hormonally-driven science to rule out any recent sexual aberrations, wouldn’t speak to him for three days until Sirius cornered him in the Charms corridor after dinner, unable to explain the way his heart lit and quickened as if it was starved for something when Remus touched him or the guilty heat-rush curling in his belly when he looked at Remus in the moon-mornings, naked and ravaged as a dying saint; at a loss and not wanting a fistfight, he kissed him again.

“Why did you?” Remus asks, watching him quietly, turning the stone Sirius brought him in his hand. He can still taste it at the back of his tongue, chalky-blue, salty-warm like the womb of the earth. “I lied to you,” he says abruptly. “I mean, I really didn’t burn anything. I cut my hands up smashing your records and I sold everything you ever gave me. I let the Aurors take care of the rest because I couldn’t go back in there. I’d have gone insane or I’d never have come out.” 

Everything except what you couldn’t cut out of yourself, Sirius thinks, and that’s just it, isn’t it? It’d be like trying to burn out his magic, or trying to keep the moon from splitting Remus’s lungs in its cyclical birth/rebirth orbit every month. Sirius figures the silence means he’s meant to say something here, but again he doesn’t know quite what, so he leans down and kisses Remus in the blank space where a word should be, feeling Remus move underneath him, a hand on his chest, expanding within himself as if his body is remembering how to accommodate someone else: the soft give of his arms, the strange fruit of his mouth opening, letting Sirius inside.

Remus’s ankles show past the hem of his trousers when he slides his legs up on the bed, thinner now than Sirius remembers him when they last did this on some rainy afternoon in early August, the memory of it smudged into something golden and unreal, like a dream that leaves you feeling bereft on waking. Underneath Remus’s shirt and on his tongue he can feel something whispering in a trapped-bird clatter against his skin; it takes him a moment to realize he’s hearing Remus’s heart for the first time in fourteen years, beating, beating, beating like an oil drum.

They don’t turn off the light, and in the end he’s grateful for it so he can see the time-numb litany of scars along Remus’s arms and chest, the one on his thigh Sirius doesn’t recognize, ten or twelve years grown over it, tasting like salt and rainwater when he bends his head to it as if in penance until Remus tugs on his hair and looks down at him with his lips parted and his cheeks flushing sweetly the way they used to, saying “Fuck me, fuck me, what are you even waiting for,” and if it weren’t for the light getting in the raincloud-grey of his hair and his fingers flowing into the swallowing black of the runes on Sirius’s chest, they could be twenty years old again, and beautiful again, and stupid again, like they never lost sight of each other after all.

Remus keeps his eyes open even when he kisses him, holding him too tightly, urging him faster with his mouth and his fingers digging razor-hot into Sirius’s shoulders, his thighs in a vice around his hips like he’s trying to pull him underwater with him. He sees the flash of an eyetooth, a fragment of a word choked off on his molars; they move in a flood of skin and heat, reactive, touching each other carelessly as if they’re offering their emptiness up to each other, and Sirius watches him until he comes, when he finally closes his eyes and bares his throat. His hair is splayed around his flushed face like a crown of thorns; Sirius leans down and bites his collarbone until he tastes blood.

—

The candle on the nightstand casts an infrequent flame around the sharp edges of the room, getting its liquor-light in between Sirius’s fingers when Remus passes him the cigarette they’re sharing and lending an overwrought Brontëan air to their tangled legs and the sound of their burgeoning laughter, calling to mind Remus’s distant bouts of blunt romanticism that never stopped surprising him in either their sweetness or their sincerity, which was possibly because he himself was always so bad at it when he tried. He forgot what this was like, the frantic closeness of sex, the compelling sort of invasion of letting another person underneath your skin and into your bones and your thoughts; he feels new, shaken out and stuck back together with the wires of his body still thrumming, like an instrument tuned to a new timbre, and he can’t decide whether he needs a drink or another fuck to set his brain-shards in order again so he presses closer to Remus instead, feeling all the knowns and unknowns in the dark hollows of their bodies, the familiar ways they fit together. If not for Harry, he thinks he could probably lie in this bed with Remus forever.

“How long had you been thinking about doing that,” Remus asks him, taking a long drag and exhaling smoke down the length of the damp sheets. They smell like Earl Grey and sex and ghosts, he thinks, mossy and linen-sweet.

“About fifteen minutes.”

“Hilarious,” says Remus. “Here, give that back. You’ve always been bad for my lungs.”

“You could always stop.”

“Too late,” says Remus. He takes a last drag and stubs the last of the cigarette out in the empty saucer on the nightstand. “I did quit, you know, for about a year when I was living in Palanga. Then I came back and gave up.”

Sirius turns his nose into Remus’s hair where his head is resting on his shoulder, thinking that this time he should memorize what this feels like—the red slide of his lips against Remus’s when he was coming inside of him, the bony ankles threaded through his bony ankles, Remus’s chest swelling and deflating against his ribs, all the tectonics of being in love that are a little like learning to breathe together again. “Were there any memories of me that didn’t make you quite such a miserable bastard?”

“Half the reason I left was because of you,” says Remus, softly, his dry lips brushing against Sirius’s pulse-point. “Because I couldn’t stop thinking about you. I never can. And it didn’t even make me unhappy, mostly, it’s just—some days it was like you never left, or like I never did. And I’d look in the mirror or make a joke and I’d see all the parts of me that were there because of you, because I love you and I will never stop loving you, and I couldn’t hate you for it. I could hate myself plenty, but I couldn’t get away from myself and I couldn’t ever get away from you either, no matter where I went. Because one scratch to the surface, and there you are.”

“I love you,” says Sirius. He says it like an accident, which is how he remembers saying it in the first place after a frustrating five minutes of trying to be romantic with his trousers undone and Remus laughing at every florid and nonsensical turn of phrase. “While I was in Azkaban it was all I could remember, some nights. There were times when I didn’t know your name and probably not even my own if someone had asked, everything was just this—disordered blur, like trying to catch something in blind static or a sandstorm. But I knew that much. Always did.”

That he wished the Dementors would eat it and have done with it, that he never understood why they couldn’t, isn’t something Remus needs to know. He feels twenty again, ready to fall back into their old obsession, where the universe becomes any space that can hold their two bodies. He wants to bury his ugliness. He wants the world to be beautiful for Remus.

“I’m sorry,” says Remus, rustling the hair at the back of his neck, midnight-quiet. 

“For what? You forgot to take your potion, I forgot to trust you, we both forgot we ever really knew each other, blah blah poor tragic arseholes, here’s your cautionary tale et cetera et cetera. Misery one-upmanship isn’t exactly working for us, as I remember your professorly reprobation reminding me not an hour ago.”

“We could always suffer together.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, we do that all the time,” he says, and watches Remus’s mouth pull into a smile like a bloom. Whatever else might be happening, he supposes, he can still make Remus smile, and that counts for fucking _everything_.

“The professional sport of Black and Lupin, masters of their craft.”

“More importantly, it’s been near-on fourteen years since we last did that and you still haven’t learned how to bask in the interim.”

“There wasn’t really a lot of note in the interim. You did say once that you’re the best fuck I’m ever going to get.”

“Nothing good?”

“I didn’t say that. Just that it’s never been the same.” His cold fingers, spreading into the heat of Sirius’s belly. “And it can’t be now, either.”

“So then it’s not the same,” says Sirius. Not that he would know how to be the same. Not that he hardly even knows how to live inside himself, or be the man Remus fell in love with for some reason, but when he’d turned up outside his door last week in a binbag and stolen shoes and his hair desperately needing washed, Remus had pulled him into his arms and held him like he’d been sitting up waiting every night for a month just to feel the burn and blister of every mile Sirius had put between them. He decides that whether or not he understands probably doesn’t matter. He’s here. They’re here. “I don’t want to be miserable anymore. I want to—I want to make you laugh again. I remember I used to know how.”

Remus smiles at him, and the candlelight gives Sirius the sense that he’s seeing him through watercolor from very far away. “Sometimes I feel like I’ve spent my whole life waiting on you,” he says quietly, with a certain force behind it that means he’s wanted to say it for a long time. “Waiting for you to get in my bed and ask me where I’d been, that first year. Waiting for you to write. Waiting for you and James to come back from putting treacle on the floor in front of the Slytherin common room. Waiting for you to notice and either cut me out forever or love me. Waiting for you to come home and waiting for you to invade half my thoughts and waiting for you to come back every time you left. I could never stop. Even at Hogwarts or when I was out of the country, I always felt like I was holding my breath, or the world was, and I used to wish you knew—that you had to feel what that was like, just once. I wanted to see you again just to tell you that, even if I thought the version of you I knew only existed in my head anyway.”

A draught murmurs through the room from the open window above the desk, where Sirius traces a crack in the wall down to the detritus of the surface because it’s easier than looking at Remus while he’s flaying him open and acting, as he does, like it’s not supposed to hurt. In the shivering dark there is a scattered record of his last year spent in caves and shorelines and deep in the bellies of distant forests, small tokens he’s carried with him to Remus’s doorstep in penance or a twelve-year debt carried halfway across the country, sitting beside a teetering pile of books and old mail: a discarded model of a Snitch, a plastic Muggle ring, the last red, red rose in the county, dried now between the pages of a strange, waterlogged book of bird illustrations Sirius found in the Midlands, on his way south again; a wine cork stamped with the year 1979, a purple seashell, a chocolate frog still in its wrapping, uneaten. He holds them, Sirius knows, on the nights when he’s gone, sits on his bed and runs his long fingers over them and feels Sirius’s absence like a physical thing, like the wind rattling the walls, like the single lonely teacup set out in the morning.

He remembers drifting along the North Sea, crossing the country from darkness into darkness, thinking of holding Harry and sneaking cigarettes to Lily on the balcony, drinking with James and Peter, making love to Remus on the living room floor. A preoccupation with the moon, a face burnt out behind his eyes that he could never bring himself to wish away; he had the sense that time had been suspended, a long, disorienting moment stretching out into whole years he kept trying to catch up to, like trying to climb an endless staircase and slipping on every name and face and watching the old-new bruise of memories spread through the nothing-noise in his head. He’d never felt so dead or so alive.

“Fuck you, I waited for you, too,” he says. Remus is already looking at him when he turns his head and kisses him, feeling the want lit up in his skin, sweet and aching and full of teeth. 

“Are you still?” His eyes move over Sirius’s face as if he’s trying to read something—as if he doesn’t dare believe it, or maybe doesn’t even want to.

“Yes,” says Sirius, “yes, Jesus bloody Christ, _always_ ,” and kisses him again, his hands coming up to Remus’s face, all the solid press of his breathing body, all his narrow strength. Remus’s scabbed knuckles come to rest at his chest with a fractured reverence, never letting go, never letting go.

—

Mornings, when they open the curtains after a night of threadbare sleep and the light gives the house a sun-scrubbed texture, Remus goes diving for fourteen years ago under his bed and at the top shelf of his closet with the fervor of a guilty pathfinder who’s been trying to circumnavigate this particular country for a whole lonely lifetime, spending entire days sifting through the rubble of a shared history the way they might pick their way through a bomb site: solemnly, hungrily, often drunkenly, with all the duty and consideration of ripping up an old bandage. One of the boxes, time-soft and dusty with a top that’s been taped and torn and taped again, holds Sirius’s old fingerless gloves and Remus’s Joy Division records on top of some framed photos he hasn’t set out; in one, he’s sitting on the balcony of his first flat with James—who is wearing the world’s tightest jeans because he’d just listened to Rocket to Russia and thought he was punk—just before Christmas 1977. In another, he watches his shadow melt into Remus’s shadow on the wall of their flat, whispering something in his ear as Remus laughs and presses every lean angle of his body into Sirius’s.

“What were you saying?” Remus asks. He smells different than he used to, Sirius thinks, which is an absurd thing to be thinking in the first place but it’s true: cooler, bluer, like cut grass and loose tobacco and too-often-washed linen. “I remember laughing but I can’t remember what you said.”

“I told you I was going to take you to Greece for the climate and the museums full of ancient buggery,” says Sirius. Often he remembers small things like this, useless, infuriating details that come to him in supernova flashes while the memory of telling Remus that he loved him the night after James's wedding or the last time he ever saw his brother remain starry, confused ink-splatters between his temples, resonating with the ache of unknowable history. “Your knees were fucked after the last moon so I said we were going AWOL and Dumbledore could choke if he had a problem with it.”

“I remember wanting to,” says Remus, “I remember wanting to fall off the map with you, so many times. Mostly I remember talking myself out of it.”

“We could’ve,” says Sirius, remembering also that they’d come close to fighting about it once or twice. “But we would’ve ended up right back here.”

Remus’s hand unfurls around Sirius’s knee, where Sirius catches his long fingers up in his own and finds them as cold as they’ve ever been, holding them until they’re blood-warm. “Maybe,” says Remus, and their shadows pull apart again in the photo, gone except for the ones they nurtured inside themselves, where they are bound too tightly to let go.

It seems to him that there was never any question of it: they would always stay in England, no matter how much they might want to leave or even talked about it, dreamily, on days when they didn’t leave the flat. They would stay and fight, no matter how much they forgot what they were even fighting for, and every day they would feel the weariness settling in just a little more, and the gaps would widen while all they could do was stand still and watch as they stopped sitting together at the kitchen table and both of them found reasons to delay coming home at night: borders forming where there once weren’t any. All their lives stretching from the end of school to this humid Wednesday afternoon on Remus’s ancient couch have taken on a preordained quality, as if this was all decided a very long time ago—maybe from the moment Fenrir Greyback dragged Remus out of his bed and into the woods, where he sunk his teeth into a five-year-old’s ribs: like someone else set it in motion and all that’s left is to live out the few choices they have in that fixed orbit, which aren’t really choices at all.

Loving Remus has always felt like the anomaly, the only incongruence in their curious and bloody symmetry: their one real act of recalcitrance that has survived time and death and distance and betrayal better than anything ever has or will. Bury them, smother them, drown them in a sunless sea—they’ll always come back to each other in the end, even as whispers, even as ghosts, as insistent and inextricable as their own beating hearts.

—

The day after the full moon, Sirius opens his eyes to the midday sun checkering the bare walls of the bedroom and the wind rustling the curtains, listening to the sound of Remus’s heart recovering against his chest and smelling last night’s rain in their hair and the iron-tang of old blood from a shallow gash on his thigh. On waking fully, he feels Remus grip his fingers for a sleepy-sweet moment, and then let go.

Days like this—the ones that are so familiar and so thrillingly new and precious to him, all at once—he believes, with every part of him that has ever mattered, that they’ll make it out of this alive. He wonders how much different it will be from what they have now, too old and too human to know much of it will look the same: a house somewhere stuffed to the seams with themselves, Remus’s torn edges against his torn edges, something to hold onto and hope for. In these elaborate futures he spins, he remakes what he can’t remember: they watch each other’s hair go grey and eat greasy takeout and laugh at themselves and make love and sometimes argue. The thought of it is too blinding-bright to hold close, but if nothing else he likes to entertain the possibility; he likes to think of them growing old here, drifting towards another future just out of sight.

Beside him, Remus stirs and presses his cold fingers into Sirius’s ribs before stretching an arm out around his waist, startlingly, and pulling himself closer in the golden afternoon lull.

“You’re taking up too much space,” says Remus, blinking up at him. He doesn’t look so old, Sirius thinks, especially not when he’s smiling. Neither of them do. “In my own bed, at that.”

“Oh? What are you going to do, bite me?”

“Haha.” Teeth, unsharpened by agony and daybreak, lancing over his collarbone. “That was old fourteen years ago.”

“That’s fourteen years of mocking to make up for.”

“You’re so romantic,” says Remus, reedy-hoarse, and then leans in and presses a stubble-prickly kiss to the hollow of Sirius’s throat, laughing sleepily, almost uncertainly, until he looks up and smiles. “I missed you,” he says, holding tight, not looking away. “God, Sirius, I missed you.”

He watches the black flecks in Remus’s eyes and the pale freckles he can see scattered over the bump at the bridge of his nose, feeling as if time and space have somehow condensed and the sagging bed has become the universe, where there are no restrictions but the restrictions of expressible words and the sound of their own hearts keeping time better than anything ever has. They’re alive and they’re in love and they’ve always been in love, and whether or not the whole situation is ideal, it’s theirs, and hope is such a bright light once you let it inside to spark, that precious finger’s-grip on a cliff side—maybe especially if you never expected to find it. All said, it’s probably the best thing either of them have ever done.

“I missed you too,” says Sirius. “You do have a certain appeal. It makes you hard to get over.”

“Fortunately, you’re stuck with me,” says Remus, “but I was sort of hoping that was the plan all along.”

“You know I’m no good on my own.”

“Is that the only reason?” asks Remus. Sirius can feel him laughing when he angles his head to kiss his nose, the edge of his jaw, underneath his chin, leaving a pink petal-imprint on his neck, where the wonderful machinery of his voice and his muscles and his heart move together in violin-vibrations, a song Sirius has never forgotten. “Would you please just kiss me before you give me a complex?”

So Sirius kisses him and they drift together for a few minutes, lazily, until they pull apart and Remus smiles up at him with his hand curling around Sirius’s arm like a question mark. “You know what we ought to do,” he says, wonderingly.

“A few things, maybe,” says Sirius, teeth at his ear.

“Go for a swim. Take some new photos, bake a cake, maybe sneak you into the cinema.” He leans up on his elbows and kisses Sirius’s shoulder. “Do something fun.”

Sirius laughs into his hair, and says, “I think we can manage that.”

And they stand up, tangled duvet and all, and he feels the dead years behind and the warm blanks of the years ahead reverberate in the back of his skull like time, like music, like loss, all as they stagger forward into the light, half-blind but together.


End file.
